


should tear a kid apart, it does

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alcohol, Chapter 815, Lowercase, Other, Zou Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 13:06:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5929501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>you want to kiss him. you want him to kiss you back. you want—suddenly, bitterly—for him to hurt you, to beat the stupid out of you; and maybe you could hate him, then, and maybe by the end you wouldn’t feel like you owe him so much.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	should tear a kid apart, it does

you shouldn’t do this. you know that well before you even start; there’s a reason you don’t drink, a whole list of reasons, from the fact that you’re a lightweight and a miserable drunk to needing all your faculties about you. your control is tenuous enough without alcohol in you, and you’ve always needed to be alert, always needed to be ready to react.

tonight, though—

tonight the strawhats and the minks are throwing a party, _again;_ and tonight you haven’t got the excuse of needing to fetch your crew to help you escape, haven’t got the heart for these people’s boundless and stupid exuberance, haven’t got the energy or the patience to sit and stare darkly into the middle distance for hours while everyone else has a good time. 

(and leaving would be worse, because you can’t trust yourself. because if you leave you might not come back, and you promised him that you wouldn’t try again so soon after the last time, you gave him your word.)

so you don’t leave, and you do the stupid thing, the weak thing. you tell yourself that you’re willing to let yourself go because he’s there to keep watch for the both of you, because you can trust him; but of course it’s nothing to do with that and everything with how little you have left to lose, with being in ruins, with hurting so much within and without that you haven’t the strength left to bear it.

the rum you steal from the table goes down burning, acrid in your throat and hot in your stomach, and you curl in on it somewhere far from the party’s focal point (strawhat, of course, he’s always at the center of everything, he’s got gravitational pull). far from your crew, too, because in the morning you’ll still have to face them and you can’t let them see you like this, you can’t demand their obedience if you haven’t got their respect—and you end up laughing into your knees about that, because there’s nothing in you that’s worth looking up to, nothing in you at all except lies and vapor and _rum._

you hit drunk and keep going, don’t mitigate the alcohol with food, ignore your doctor’s instinct and don’t stop for water. you’ve wanted to do this so often but always been too cautious, after the one and only time you were stupid enough; always wanted to find the oblivion everyone claims to see at the bottom of the bottle, for all that all you ever found when you tried to drown your sorrows was them drowning you.

the party goes on around you—away from you, mostly, you chose your spot well, hidden in the shadowy crevice between a tree’s craggy roots—and the rum doesn’t make the celebration any less present but it does do that very thing to you. the noise stops being too much and too sharp and digging into your skull; the lights and the laughter stop making you flinch. you even manage a sort of half-doze, and it’s better than sleeping, not seized by nightmares.

and maybe it might have been all right, if you’d stayed where you were. if you’d remained in the hole you found and stayed the night there, it would’ve been fine, a poor decision punished with only a headache and a sour stomach.

but you’re a master of bad ideas and poorly-executed plans, and so: hours later when you return from the privy you don’t make it back to your hiding place, wander instead past the quieter clusters of people into which the party’s dissolved, go looking for what feels like the only thing your eyes can still see.

you find him sitting on a log across from a massive mink in the form of a cat and several others you aren’t clear-headed enough to remember, a fire between them. his sniper is asleep nearby, snoring with his slingshot and the little ship’s doctor hugged to his chest; the conversation between the minks is quiet, and the goal of your meandering quest across the party’s war zone is (uncharacteristically) quieter still.

stopped just past the edge of their circle you watch him, too deep into drink to feel awkward for staring, too caught by the sight to finish your trek. he’s sitting there with his chin in his palm and his elbow propped on his knee, looking at the large mink and its entourage while they speak; and he’s smiling but preternaturally calm, eased by the hour of the night into something less overwhelming. 

the way the fire catches his face and his unruly hair and the hat hanging by its string against his back makes him look like the kind of picture you’d find in a story book. makes him look like gold roger, maybe, but that’s not what you see, because it’s not history and fairy tale that make your heart clench in your chest.

you want to kiss him. you want him to kiss you back. you want—suddenly, bitterly—for him to hurt you, to beat the stupid out of you; and maybe you could hate him, then, and maybe by the end you wouldn’t feel like you owe him so much. 

(but that’s not how it works, you know that. your debts never went away just because those you owed them to hurt you. even your debt to joker remains, even after all that he did to you; didn’t wash away with the blood, just meant that you’ll never let yourself repay it, will carry the imbalance of it to your grave.)

and still, under this twisted thought; under the overwhelming desire to tell him to shove you against the nearest wall and rain blows down on you until you can’t see or speak for the blood; there’s the truer thing, the pathetic selfish thing that it’s just like you to want even when you know it isn’t anything you deserve.

you want him to be kind, just like always. you want to kiss him and you want him to kiss you back and you want it to mean that he’ll keep you, that you can be his, that there’s anything at all in you he wants in return.

and it’s such a foolish thing to admit to yourself that standing in the dark at the edge of his fire you sneer at how brainless you are. you’re wretched—you’ve got nothing to give him and every burden to place on his shoulders, you’re rotten and ruined all the way through, you’re in pieces now and you keep making it his trouble to pick those pieces up—you’re so _fucked up_ you can’t stand it, and you think that when he looks at you he must see what people see when they look at drunks in the gutter with vomit on their clothes and absent expressions. filth and mistakes and someone to pity, someone to feel bad for without coming too close to failure’s reek.

another moment when you might have stopped and escaped the disaster you’re stumbling irrevocably into, only: that’s when he glances suddenly up and he sees you, and in his expression you don’t see what you’re thinking. “torao!” he says, his voice happy, and you start with having been caught, don’t move or know what to do till he tells you, “come here, come sit with me.”

you do it. you want to do what he wants, all the time. maybe if you do it enough you’ll make yourself lighter, less of a weight for him to bear.

you do it out of selfishness, too, because there’s nothing you want more in that instant than to sit close enough to him to feel him warm against your side, nothing you want more than being with him. (like a wounded animal crawling back to its comfort.) the tangle of your thoughts melts in the face of him, leaves you only with that; and it’s funny how only days ago you realized you’ve never wanted for yourself but now you can’t _stop._

he doesn’t ask where you’ve been, when you drop heavily onto the log beside him, the empty bottle of rum still in your working hand and your bandaged arm tucked against your torso. just says, “i missed you. i’m glad you came.”

it’s so incongruous that you laugh, and this close to him you lose all sense of what you’re allowed; you bury the sound against his shoulder, lean into him with all of you so your head’s just over his collarbone. he’s warm just like you imagined, and when you feel him slide his arm around your back in response you think you’d like to die then and there, because nothing will ever be better than this.

“i didn’t think torao drank,” he says, not admonishing, just—curious. humiliation spikes through you instantly, anyway, that you’re so painfully obvious, that you’re a wreck and tonight anyone can see.

into his shoulder, you mumble, “sorry.” you don’t move, though, haven’t the willpower to pull away.

“it’s okay,” he says, and maybe you’re not just drunk but hallucinating, too, because you think you feel something very like a kiss in your hair. (you had your hat before, you think. you don’t know where it is.) “i was just sayin’.”

you want to string words together into a reply that won’t sound stupid. you want to tell him something good, something that won’t make him regret letting you get so close—something about how much this means, how much he does, how much you need to thank him.

instead your brain skips tracks, and what you get out, haltingly, is far worse: “i wasn’t going to come back. earlier, when i left, i wasn’t going to stay. i was going to tell my crew to set sail.”

you can feel his breathing slow where you’re pressed against him, and you want to drag all the words back into your mouth and swallow hard, because you hadn’t meant to tell him that, you don’t know why you did. 

he says, “i would’ve been sad if you did.” and, “i’m glad you didn’t go.”

“i think i made a mistake,” falls out of your mouth before you can stop. “i think i should have gone.” 

your fingers are tight around the neck of the bottle, now, your other hand clutched involuntarily at the fabric of your own shirt. you can feel the beat of your heart in your stomach, for all that it’s not in your chest, your magic transmitting the throb from afar. 

“why?” the question is soft, and you don’t know why it’s this that brings tears suddenly to your tightly-closed eyes. distantly, blearily, you hope you’re not crying already, because that’s another thing you do when you’re drunk, maybe because you can’t do it the rest of the time and you’ve got a backlog leagues long. sobbing into his shirt without warning, that would really complete tonight’s picture, you falling apart in plain sight. 

you manage not to, you think. your throat’s tight but you don’t gasp with it, push the shudder down. what you say, though, that isn’t much better: “you don’t deserve—you shouldn’t, shouldn’t have to deal with me,” ending on an awful hiccup that makes both of you jolt. 

his arm tightens around you, reflexive. “what if i want to,” he says, evenly. “i don’t do anything i don’t want to.”

“you’re wrong.” you try to keep still, try not to shake, try not to give him any reason to let you go, because you don’t want that, even while you can’t stop talking you don’t want him to push you away. “you don’t want, you just think—“

he interrupts you. says firmly, “don’t tell me what i think,” and, with inexplicable sudden worry, “it’s okay, torao, it’s okay, it’s all right.”

it takes you a moment to realize that his concern sources from the fact that you’ve started quivering despite yourself. enhanced physiological tremor, your body’s most frustrating habit, twice as bad when you’ve been drinking all night. “sorry-sorry-sorry. sorry . . .”

“it’s okay,” he repeats, and maybe you do cry, then, for all that you really hoped that you wouldn’t; let the bottle you’d been holding slide to the ground with a low thump against the dirt and hug at his waist. you don’t know why he doesn’t finally shove you away, and you try to tell him so but you can't.

but his arm stays wrapped ‘round your back, and through the thick drowsiness that descends on you you think you can feel his other hand pressed against your side and his chin against the crown of your head, as close as the two of you can be, closer than you’ve ever been before. (or maybe not; the image of your glove-clad hands in the bloody gaping wound of his chest swims in front of your eyes, reminds you you’ve been far closer than that.)

your thoughts start sinking before you can finish them, after that, and you let them pull the rest of you down.

only one thing sticks, in the descent, a want that’s clearer than any of the others, drawn out by the bliss that he gives you even when you’re at your worst: _i hope joker kills me before he kills you._ just like you, to be selfishly cruel to the last.

you won’t remember any of it in the morning.


End file.
